The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  “My reading that letter is inconclusive,” Maggie told the old man quickly, “for you still don’t know what circumstances I found it under. Perhaps it was after your death at the age of one hundred and three; I’m not going to say. Only now you must be certain to leave it there, for someday I must indeed read it.”

  Color came back into the poet’s face again. “Yes, of course. Yes. Yes, I will.” He smiled. “My letter worked, then. It intrigued you enough to stay in the canyon. To meet them, and walk the path.”

  “You and your damn riddles, Cooper,” she said with exasperation. “Why couldn’t you have written me something a bit clearer? Why can’t you even be clear with me now?”

  He rubbed his face with one hand, looking every bit his age. “I’ve been around them too long.”

  She sat down again, her knees close to his, and took his two thin hands in her own. “Tell me about the Nightmage,” she said. “Explain it to me. No riddles this time.”

  “No riddles,” Cooper agreed. His hands were trembling. “I’m afraid I need a drink.”

  “All right.” Maggie rose. “I’ll get it. I know where you keep it, after all.”

  She came back with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses. She poured, and handed one to Cooper.

  “The Nightmage was Anna’s muse,” Cooper told her, his eyes narrowing with distaste for the creature. “He was the first of these fairies to—”

  “Fairies?” Maggie interrupted him.

  “I’m an Englishman, and my mother was a Celt. That’s what I’ve decided to call them. To Anna they were angels … until the end, when she thought them no better than the devil himself. What do you call them, Black Maggie?”

  “I don’t know. Spirits of the mountain, of the land?”

  “That will do. The names, like the shapes, are ones that they wear for us. They don’t much matter to them.”

  Maggie thought of Thumper, joyfully chanting out her name. In this, at least, he was wrong.

  “The Nightmage was the first of them for Anna,” he continued, “and he gave her the Sight to see the rest. Under his influence, Anna began to paint the paintings in this house. It is the best work she’s ever done; true work, and they all know it…”

  Maggie didn’t know if he referred to the critics who ignored it, or to the creatures on the mountain.

  “… But what she didn’t understand is that they have artists among them too. They call them mages. And for some of them, we are the materials they use. Our lives are their raw canvas; our emotions are the paints. We’re the clay: they push a little here, they prod a little there, till the work is done. If they drive a man or woman insane in the process, it matters little to them. They are amoral beings, Anna told me. They are neither good nor bad, Marguerita; those concepts mean nothing at all to them. The Nightmage was an artist, like Anna. And she was the work that he was creating. When she was strong in herself and in her art, the work they created of each other was good. But later, when Anna was frightened, and a bit unstable … then it all went wrong.”

  “And the land mirrored Anna’s nightmares,” Maggie said, remembering the last letter to Maisie.

  “That’s right. So she stopped it. She stopped him, and proved herself to be the stronger artist after all. Perhaps he didn’t know that she was granddaughter to a Mexican bruja, a witch woman. Anna bound her muse into a painting, into a shape where he could do her no harm. You’ve seen him, the white stag in the hills? She trapped him in that shape, that animal form, by putting the essence of him somewhere else. In the painting. And that’s why they want the painting back again so badly.” He gave Maggie a haunted look. “If I had it. I’d give it to them now.”

  “So what was it that happened to frighten Anna?” she asked, although she already knew the answer. But how much did Cooper know, she wondered? He hesitated before he spoke.

  “She became pregnant,” Cooper told her frankly, his blue eyes holding shadows of the past. “She never wanted children—she wanted to paint. Art was everything to her. I confess I never wanted them either. Poems and paintings were enough for us both.

  “Anna never told me when she conceived. They helped her to end the pregnancy before it had gotten very far along. But it turns out the little Catholic girl was strong in Anna after all. It was an impossible situation for her; she saw it as a choice between being a mother and a painter. That’s a choice no one should have to make. Afterwards, it haunted her—she lost her faith in her art, in the mountains, and even her faith in me. She replaced it with her childhood faith … and once that came back into her life, then the rest of us were damned to hell.”

  He poured himself another shot of whiskey, the wound as raw as it had been decades before.

  “How did you find all this out,” Maggie said, “if Anna never told you?”

  “The stones, the water told me. Tomás has taught me to listen to them. It took me many years to learn, but I’m a stubborn old man.”

  “They told you what happened to the child?” she said carefully.

  “There was no child. I told you, she ended the pregnancy. Afterwards, she suffered. And then she made that last painting.”

  Maggie frowned. Something was bothering her. “Why,” she asked, “do these creatures come to ask you where the painting is? Why not go back and ask Anna herself?”

  He smiled. “Because that clever witch-woman made herself, and the painting, invisible to them. They can’t find her on the spiral path. It’s as if she never existed at all. But I can find her. I know I can. I can find her in hell itself if I have to.”

  She looked at him, alarmed. “What are you planning, Cooper?”

  He leaned forward, and confided to her, “Tomorrow I’m going to walk the spiral path. It’s because of you that I know it can be done. Tomorrow night is April sixteenth. I’m going to return to that night so many years ago, when it all fell apart. But this time, I’ll be with Anna. This time she’ll keep the child.”

  “You can’t,” said Maggie, suddenly cold. “You can’t, Cooper. That will change everything.” And Anna Naverra would miscarry. And Fox would never have been.

  “Exactly,” he said to her. “Look at me. I’m a drunk, a recluse, an unfashionable poet. I’m an old and broken man. This is not the future I wanted.”

  “I’m in this future, Cooper. And Johnny Foxxe. Tomás Yazzie. Juan and Dora. What’s going to happen to us if you do this?”

  “Maybe we’ll know each other anyway. Or maybe not. That can’t be helped. Don’t judge me harshly, Marguerita. You’ll still be a fine poet without me—remember that, my dear, if you can. Somewhere at the core of your being. Try to understand. I’d give the sun and moon themselves to be with Anna again.”

  She looked at the old man’s ruined face, and saw that this simple statement was true. Yet she knew what would happen tomorrow night. He would join his lover, but not by walking into the past on a pathway of stars. She swallowed hard, knowing that he was going to his death, and that she must not stop him.

  She stood, averting her face from Cooper so that he wouldn’t see the sorrow written on it. She walked to his desk. She could feel the floorboards swaying gently underfoot; she could hear the distant song of the stars; and she wondered how much longer she would be able to stay here with him. She leaned against the poet’s desk, bracing herself against the shifting of the room. Her eyes resting on the list of her own poems pinned to his bulletin board.

  “What is this?” she asked, pointing at it.

  “Your essence, my dear. As clear a portrait as any photograph could be. Those poems are the reason I knew that you could learn the language of this place—even if you’d never walked the spiral path and come from the wood that night. Are you writing poems?” His voice became stern. “Or are you still running away from your true nature, Marguerita Black?”

  She turned back to him. “I’m hearing them again; I can feel them growing inside of me. You were right to bring me here, Cooper. This is the land of poetry. And you, you’ve b
een writing poems yourself. Why didn’t you bloody tell me?”

  His smile was rueful. “I would have, my dear. As soon as The Saguaro Forest was complete. But now, I’m afraid, I’ve bargained them away. The poems will go to the mage who will set me on the spiral path.”

  Maggie looked at him sharply. “A mage? It isn’t Crow who is taking you?”

  “Crow? That creature? Heavens, no. It’s the one I call the Drowned Girl. An enchanting little fairy, she is. And yet she drives a hard bargain.”

  “All your poems, Cooper? You’ve given them all away?”

  “Yes. But don’t look so sad, my dear. They were for the mountain. And for the wood wife, who’s been good to me for all these years. Perhaps they were never meant for the world. No great loss. The world doesn’t want them.”

  “And is that why you’ve kept Anna’s paintings here? Do they belong to the mountain too?”

  He frowned. “No, I think I was wrong about them. They should have been exhibited. It was not dammas to keep them here; they need to move out into the world. Anna couldn’t let go of them. They were precious to her, our only children. I couldn’t let them go either. But you, you should exhibit them.” Then Cooper looked up at her and smiled. “Yet, what does any of this matter now? After tomorrow night, all this will change, and Anna will exhibit them herself.” He raised his glass. “Come now, let’s drink a toast to you, Black Maggie. And to poetry. If we meet again, it will be in your future, not in mine.”

  “That sounds like a farewell. I’m not going yet.”

  “I think you are. I can see the desk right through your hand, my dear. Tell me something, quick, before you go. Do you like the ninth of the ‘Wood Wife’ poems?”

  “I like all your poems, Cooper, you know that.”

  “But that one, Marguerita—what about that one?”

  The floor slipped sideways, the stars swirled around her shoulders, and she could not answer him. Time was pulling at her again. She was not One of Them, she could not ignore it. Time, to her, moved in only one way—to stay in this place was to swim against floodwater running in the opposite direction. Her strength was ebbing, but still she swam, hanging onto that place, that time, trying to find a solid foothold that would keep her there, if only long enough to say good-bye.

  She found it, climbing with great effort from the stream of Time to the banks of a wash. The wash was dry, the sand turned to silver by the light of the round moon overhead. She was in the desert, her desert. But the place was not familiar to her. She stumbled up the wash, heading east, judging by the shapes of the Rincons’ dark slopes. She stopped abruptly. There was a body there—a dead man lying face down in the dirt. She did not need to roll the body over to know it was Davis Cooper.

  She looked down at him, her eyes burning and yet dry, as terribly dry as the land. She heard the sound of coyotes calling, grieving—there must have been hundreds of them. Then she felt the pull, and she gave in to it, grateful to let it spin her away from that night, that wash, leaving a single set of footprints behind her in the sand.

  As she gave up her resistance to it, the pull of the path seemed to lessen. The moonlit desert stretched below her as she stood in the very center of the spiral. The mountains surrounded her, spreading out to the edges of the earth. She could see with a sight that was not human sight. She could see Johnny Foxxe build a willow lodge by Deer Head Springs, and a fire that would not speak. Above him, in the trees, a white owl hovered who was not a white owl but a mage. She could see a fire in Red Springs Canyon, and Tomás Yazzie’s stern face by its light. These flames murmured softly, and the man gifted them with tobacco, listening with rapt attention.

  She could see the Alders, nursing three tiny fox pups who would not make it through the night. She could see the ghostly stag by Red Springs, glowing like candle flame in the dark. She could see Juan del Rio, marked with paint, marked as Tough he were One of Them, waiting in vain for the beautiful mage who had deserted him by Redwater Creek.

  And she could see that mage, the Drowned Girl, standing in a dry wash bed running south of the canyon. Cooper was with her. He had brought the package of poems. The Floodmage looked at him with cold, black eyes. She had painted his flesh with red spiral marks. Now she pointed a finger and spoke a word, and the wash bed slowly twisted. It sparkled like coins in the light of the moon, and Cooper put one foot upon the spiral.

  “Imagine this place, these hills, this land, in that moment in Time where you wish to be,” the girl whispered in the old man’s ear. “I’ll take you there. I’ll hang onto your hand. It’s as easy as stepping from one stone to another.”

  She smiled an innocent, young girl’s smile. Cooper stepped upon the path. He stepped through Time. Maggie could see it swirl and turn around him, she could hear the song of the stars and the flood as he stepped on the path, stepped into the past, stepped into 1948 … into the deadly embrace of the water that had flooded the wash bed back then.

  The Floodmage was as good as her word. She didn’t let go of the old man’s hand. She was still holding tight when she stepped back through Time to return to the dry riverbed.

  “You see, Cooper,” she said, amused, as she picked up the package he’d left in the sand, “I took you there. I didn’t let go. I kept my side of the bargain.”

  But now another being stood on the banks of the wash, looking down on the translucent girl. She was a woman in a carved wooden mask, wearing only a cloak made of dried brown leaves. Beneath the cloak, her skin was tattooed with lines like the grain of polished oak. When she spoke, her voice was soft as the whisper of wind in a mesquite grove. “And what will you give to me, water witch, for taking my man away from me?”

  “Your freedom, wood wife,” said the girl. “You’ve been with humankind too long. You are as One of Them and not One of Us. Now his poems will bind you no more.”

  “It was never a poem that bound me,” said the other, her voice low and fierce.

  “What do you want then?” the girl said lightly.

  “Give me his poems,” said the masked woman.

  “Take them.” The girl crossed the wash and climbed the bank, her white feet leaving no tracks. She handed the package to the woman, bowed, and then faded like mist on the stones. She sunk back into the cracks of the land, to the water coursing far underground.

  The Woodmage tore the brown paper wrapping, and uncovered the precious pages within. She held them to her breast for a long, silent moment—then she threw them into the sky. The pages came down, falling as rain. Where they fell, tall cactus sprang up and took root: a forest of mature saguaro turned to silver by the light of the moon.

  Maggie watched as the Woodmage turned in the direction of Red Springs Canyon, shaped as María Rosa now: a small, old woman in a shapeless dress, passing beneath the saguaro’s outstretched arms. It was then that coyotes began to gather, moving through cactus and creosote, called to the side of the dry wash bed by the echoing cries of their shape-shifting kin: Crow, in his swift coyote-shape; Angela and Isabella Foxxe; Pepe and his littermates—the seven Hernandez brothers. They sang for the passing of a Spiritmage, of the one who had stood watching over the east through the years when the Nightmage no longer could—although Davis Cooper had never even known that a mage was what he had become.

  As she listened to the coyotes’ ghostly cries, Time and the rising wind moved faster, pulling, spinning Maggie into the stars that hung low over the desert. “Crow,” she called out, trying to picture the mountain, the cliff, his hand, his sly face. Where was he? Why did he not pull her back? What foolish bargain had Maggie made that would now prove to be her own undoing? She could hear the bells on her ankles jingle as Time dropped her into a funnel of stars, a bottomless well down which she was falling, and would fall forever, the past in her throat, the future in her teeth, the death song in her ears. The song of the coyotes … the song of the stars … the deep bass song of the mountains below…

  She panicked, and flailed, looking for something solid to hang
onto. Her hand met flesh, and she grabbed for it, falling heavily to the hard, unyielding ground. Pain exploded as her shins met rock, and the skin of her cheek scraped across loose stone. Arms closed around her. “Crow,” she gasped.

  “Good god, Maggie,” Fox answered her.

  “Don’t let me go,” she said to him.

  “I won’t.” And he held her tight.

  • • •

  Crow lifted his head and sniffed the air. The wind carried the sound of bells. Black Maggie was now down by Redwater Creek; she’d returned from the path without his help, and of all the ways the woman had surprised him, this one surprised him the most.

  Good. Crow liked surprises. It made the world a more interesting place. And the night promised many more to come; this night, of all the nights in the wheel of human Time: the 31st of October. Samhain. Cooper called it Allhallows’ Eve. The next morning, to Anna, was the Day of the Dead. Crow smiled a wolfish smile, anticipating the night ahead. It was the night that they rose from the earth, the trees, the water, the roots of the wood—rose and rode the Rincon hills, and marked the land as their own.

  Crow climbed to his feet on the sharp rock ledge where he had been sitting the whole day long, waiting for Black Maggie to call to him from the silt of the past’s floodwaters. Many hours had passed while she was in that place—where Time moved faster, and slower, than here. Now the moon had risen. The Star Maker flung jewels across a black sky. Crow shaped himself into coyote form, sniffed the air, and followed Maggie’s trail. He leapt down the dark, steep mountain slopes to the canyon below, howling as he ran. All around him, his kin in the midnight hills lifted their voices in answer.

  He found the woman at the edge of the creek in the place where the water formed deep bathing pools. He waited in the shadows, coyote ears cocked forward, and watched her curiously. How had she gotten back again? She was white as bone and breathing hard; her chest rose and fell beneath the spiral marks he had painted on her. Crow narrowed his eyes, watching Johnny Foxxe wash the blood from her cheek with a bright red cloth. The one called Dora stood nearby, her unbound hair the copper color of the moon. A black dog caught the scent of Crow and growled, his hackles rising.